One principle I genuinely do live by is that if you approach life with curiosity and a sense of openness, then you’ll never be bored — or boring. You’ll also be safe from energy vampires, according to this week’s episode of What We Do in the Shadows. In a new addition to the show’s lore, it turns out that positive attention and genuine interest repel energy vampires, leaving Colin unable to feed after he acquires an exciting new shiner from a falling block of frozen poop. (More on that later.)
The first part makes sense. Energy vampires feed on boredom and irritation, and therefore charisma is their garlic (or holy water or sunlight). It’s not an encounter with a charismatic person that repels them but their own charismatic qualities. So in a way, they’re doing it to themselves, which kills the garlic metaphor. But they’re not, because something interesting happened to them, rather than their having interesting personalities? And couldn’t he tell these stories in a boring way? I bet Colin’s vacation photos from that bike trip to Vietnam were tedious as hell. Anyway, it’s complicated and kind of muddled, and it gets more so when social media enters the situation.
Midway through “Urgent Care,†Nandor takes Colin out on the streets of Staten Island in search of humans to drain. In the process, Colin ends up appearing in a popular TikTok video, which further degrades his already weakened state. But social-media attention is by no means all positive — even the most wholesome viral stars have their share of haters, and the video of Colin that makes its way online makes him look like an idiot. That mockery and resentment should give Colin sweet succor, not make him weaker, right? Perhaps it just happens this way in the early stages of viral fame? The nourishing negativity comes later when Colin gets milkshake ducked.*
Beyond the lingering questions, Colin’s story line was the most chaotic of the three this week. (I’m counting Laszlo’s budding mad-scientist career as its own story line.) The A-plot — which begins with Nadja pushing Guillermo in a shopping cart through a truck yard and ends with him quoting Aliens — was more satisfying. It’s been a while since WWDITS took us out of the human world and into the vampire underground. And the familiars’ clinic, accessible only through a portal in a 24-hour veterinarian’s office, was a more coherent piece of world-building than the complications with Colin. We moved the plot forward; we filled out the vampires’ world with some weird details (the vintage Good Housekeeping magazines in the waiting room were a nice anachronistic touch); we got some fun prosthetic makeups and haunted-house sets — all great things.
At first, I thought that “Urgent Care†might draw out the sharing of Guillermo’s secret until the end of the episode: Nadja thinks that his Van Helsing heritage is the reason why Guillermo’s blood tests were unusual, and he could have kept up this charade until they got home if that meddling doctor (guest star Wayne Federman) hadn’t found her first. But I’m glad that she knows, if only to keep this season’s overarching story line moving. Nadja’s haste to rescue her roommate’s familiar might seem like an act of love — oh, she really cares about him, after all! But don’t be fooled. She was acting out of self-interest here, as harboring a descendant of Abraham Van Helsing could have serious consequences for her, Laszlo, and the rest. She doesn’t really care if he dies; she cares if she gets found out.
Speaking of — all this happens because Laszlo, the most fatherly of the Staten Island vampire crew, decides to teach Guillermo to fly in the same way human parents teach their kids to swim or ride a bike: Just push ’em out there and let ’em figure it out. Laszlo’s paternal side was more pronounced last season when he had baby Colin to care for. With Colin all re-grown up, he’s extending those same caregiving instincts to Guillermo. It also gives him an excuse to experiment with some whimsical-ass flying frogs as part of the preferred pastime of Victorian-era gentlemen (or at least a gentleman who was alive during the Victorian era): science! And, as with his 19th-century counterparts, the sanctity of life comes second to his fascinating experiments. Why have two vampires swap energy fields when a bit of concealer would do? Because you can!
In terms of recurring WWDITS bits, “Urgent Care†played the hits to a certain extent: Matt Berry enunciating colorful euphemisms for various sex acts. The Guide feeding a stray familiar chunks of raw chicken. (The vampires had Guillermo on the same diet at the beginning of season three, during the period where he was briefly imprisoned in their basement.) But these familiar details were used in service of new settings, situations, and plots. Even when this week’s episode was messy, it was still trying new things. And in the fifth season of a sitcom, that’s essential if a series is going to survive.
Craven Mirth
• *We all know what milkshake duck means at this point, yes? Just in case …
• Joyous news for Matt Berry fans (which, I assume, is everyone reading this recap): Toast of Tinseltown makes its U.S. streaming debut on the Roku Channel tomorrow, Friday, August 11.
• I honestly did not peg Laszlo as a “support the troops†type!
• “The only hairy frog I’m interested in is between your legs, my darling.†“It’s not just the frog. It’s the whole swamp.â€
• New phobia unlocked: Five-pound blocks of frozen shits and pisses (a.k.a. “blue iceâ€) falling from the sky are rare but not unheard of. An entire Indian village was pelted with poo hail in 2018, as were parts of Detroit in 2019 and the English village of Portsmouth in 2021. No one was hurt in those incidents, but a woman in another Indian village sustained shoulder injuries when a chunk of “blue ice†crashed through her roof in 2016.
• Another thing we haven’t seen in a few episodes is one of the sanguine vampires killing and eating a human, as Nadja does in the truck yard.
• If seeing a vet instead of a doctor is good enough for assassins and mobsters, then it’s good enough for vampires’ familiars, damn it!
• John Slattery had Colin’s accent pinpointed perfectly: Mark Proksch is from Onalaska, Wisconsin, on the western side of the state.
• The most intriguing bit of casual world-building this week was in a throwaway line: The doctor tells Nadja he can’t let Guillermo go, or he’ll lose his license. That implies the existence of a vampire’s familiar medicine licensing board, which implies the existence of a DVFM exam, which implies a series of accredited vampire’s familiar medical schools …
• “I really like the smell of burning hair.†Colin is the biggest freak out of all of them, I’m telling you.
• If embracing life with a childlike sense of wonder repels energy vampires, does that make Drew Barrymore their Van Helsing?